Let me tell you another story about a northern community where they had suicides on a regular basis with two different cohorts. One cohort was older teenagers, 17- and 18-year-olds, and the other one was 10- and 11-years-olds. Every month they were losing members of their small community. This was several years ago. We were involved with this community in a whole community approach to wellness, identification of problems, and supporting gatekeepers in that community. In that community the suicides stopped. For several years there were no suicides in that community.
What that suggests to me is that even in the most difficult of circumstances, if you're willing to look at the problem in a different way, if you look at the capacity that already exists in a community and you engage a community in terms not only of what they're doing wrong but of what their wellness could be, you can see change happen. They owned that change. It wasn't a bunch of researchers flying in or dropping in and saving the day. It was working with a community to find a solution based on a whole community approach that allowed them to change the course of how that community was coping with whatever circumstances they had.
There are enough of these stories that exist to suggest to me we can actually make a difference, but we don't weave these stories together. We don't have any national strategy, national plan, to implement with a way of evaluating so that one story in the one community could actually be replicated in the other community with the same kind of impact.
I think what we're trying to propose is this: how do we help all those communities learn from what they have suffered through or what they have been able to overcome in order to help other communities at the same time? Rather than being overwhelmed by a problem.... It's numbing when you think about the numbers and the impact. I prefer to think about where the opportunity is for us to do something different. I've never seen a time in my entire career when the opportunity has been as great as right now in terms of public willingness, the philanthropic willingness, and government's willingness to actually do something bold and get it done.